The Return of the Native: Indigeneity, Settler-Colonialism and the Multiple Ironies in Israeli-Australian Commemorative Narrative of the Palestine Campaign

Abstract

At the end of the 2010s, Israel sought to align itself with a range of Indigenous struggles to both conceal the ongoing nature of settler-colonialism and to attempt to position the Zionist-state project as an indigenous one. This paper examines one instance of this trend, in the recent commemorative events surrounding the centenary of the “Palestine Campaign”, a military campaign fought by Australian soldiers in World War I. The paper argues that official Israeli commemoration of this campaign, and the recent foregrounding of the role of Aboriginal servicemen in it, was a cynical strategy of the Israel state, whose design is ultimately to occlude the Palestinian narrative and indigeneity in their ancestral lands.